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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking at the product page [0] and wondering how those two statements are compatible:

> Bufstream runs fully within your AWS or GCP VPC, giving you complete control over your data, metadata, and uptime. Unlike the alternatives, Bufstream never phones home.

> Bufstream pricing is simple: just $0.002 per uncompressed GiB written (about $2 per TiB). We don't charge any per-core, per-agent, or per-call fees.

Surely they wouldn’t run their entire business on the honor system?

[0] https://buf.build/product/bufstream

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Based on the introduction

> As of October 2024, Bufstream was deployed only with select customers.

my assumption would be an honor system might be doable. They are exposing themselves to risk of abuse of course but it might be a worthy trade off for getting certain clients on board.

That's correct. We hop onto Zoom calls with our customers on an agreed cadence, and they share a billing report with us to confirm usage/metering. For enterprise customers specifically, it works great. They don't want to violate contracts, and it also gives us a natural check-in point to ensure things are going smoothly with their deployment.

When we say fully air-gapped, we mean it!

A program is either opensourced or not. When its sources aren't available - one should never trust "it doesn't phone home" claims.

If a company makes unambiguous claims in their advertising which turn out to be false, they will get sued and maybe even fined by regulators. Much of the world does in fact operate on this kind of trust.

If you can stick it in a vpc with zero egress and have it run, it doesn’t matter. It won’t be phoning home even if it wants to

Firewalls solve problems like this. Relying on a secret callback mechanism to run your business is high risk, when you have sophisticated customers. A number of industries have low risk tolerance and default deny traffic, which would make those industries inaccessible to a company that tried to operate that way.

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